Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / The Strange Rise of Fanaticism: The 339th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

The Strange Rise of Fanaticism: The 339th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Upbeat Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream number 339, which damn well better be divisible by three.
• 0:15
  Three by 113.
• 0:16
  Three by 113, so there you go.
• 0:18
  That's it, that's it.
• 0:20
  That's it?
• 0:21
  I mean one and 339.
• 0:22
  Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 0:24
  Well, so a near miss.
• 0:26
  A near miss on primatude.
• 0:27
  A near miss on primatude.
• 0:30
  Well, I am Dr.
• 0:32
  Bret Weinstein.
• 0:33
  You're Dr.
• 0:33
  Heather Heying.
• 0:34
  This is going to be a very interesting episode that I suspect is going to alter many people's view of the landscape around them and maybe even their own position within it.
• 0:50
  Wow.
• 0:50
  I think what we have in store is the exploration of a model that yes, is brought to the surface by the developing story of Jason Arday's resignation and then suicide, but touches so many other issues.
• 1:10
  Anyway, it's gonna be an interesting exploration.
• 1:12
  We're gonna put a model on the table and it's, I think, powerful.
• 1:17
  It will be reminiscent to long time viewers of some of the explorations we did during COVID where we were trying to sort out what the heck is going on where you have these diametrically opposed presentations of subject matter and a, what's the polite word for clusterfuck?
• 1:38
  I've forgotten what it is.
• 1:40
  I have to.
• 1:41
  We'll just call it a clusterfail.
• 1:43
  A conflagration in the public space where anybody who tries to sort things out finds themselves in hot water of one or more kinds.
• 1:54
  Indeed.
• 1:55
  And we will start by just reviewing some of what we collectively think we know about the person, the story before launching into the model.
• 2:08
  Unfortunately, Locals is down right now, so you cannot join us on Locals as we usually ask you to do, but we will be having another Q&A next this upcoming Sunday.
• 2:16
  Join us on Locals there.
• 2:17
  Also, when it's working, join us on Locals for, to see these twice monthly Q&As, to see all the past Q&As, join the Discord server, all that good stuff.
• 2:29
  And a reminder that we were demonetized by YouTube back in the height of COVID.
• 2:34
  And while they quietly remonetized us last year, it is pretty clear that we are still having, there's still fingers on the scales in various ways in various hidden parts of the interwebs.
• 2:48
  So we appreciate if you subscribe, like, share, what you see from us that you appreciate.
• 2:55
  And that helps us get a better understanding of what the reach that we are having actually is.
• 3:03
  Yep, and I would also just add one thing to that.
• 3:06
  I don't pay terribly close attention to my follower account, to my follower count on X, but I recently went and looked up the number of followers and it's been dead flat for, I think a year, just simply doesn't move.
• 3:23
  So if you're watching this on X, or if you have an X account, if you would go there and see whether or not that's the result of some kind of a cap that's been instituted, I would appreciate it.
• 3:34
  Yeah, I feel like I'm gonna cross all the platforms, even the ones that are supposedly run by people who are not interested in doing this.
• 3:41
  Certainly, like I have not been posting on Twitter on X actively for a while, but long before I stopped, my number stopped climbing and they've been within a few hundred of that number for many years, literally a few hundred at almost a quarter million followers.
• 3:57
  So that's not coherent.
• 4:00
  Every time I do go on, I see more followers, like, huh, it's not coherent.
• 4:04
  But this is true across all the platforms, what we can't see, which is to say, all the machinations behind the scenes, can be almost anything.
• 4:15
  So again, if you are appreciating what you're seeing, subscribe, like, share, all of that, I resist ever telling people to turn on notifications because I think that's bad for your mental health.
• 4:26
  But if that is something that you otherwise do in your life, go ahead and do that as well.
• 4:30
  Yep, I think that's a very fair request.
• 4:34
  Don't wreck your life to turn on notifications for us, but if you've got them on, hey, do us a favor flip those switches, mash those buttons, whatever it is the kids say.
• 4:46
  Don't mash any buttons.
• 4:47
  Don't mash any buttons, okay, great.
• 4:50
  Okay, let's pay the rent, what?
• 4:51
  Yeah, don't mash any nations.
• 4:54
  I think it's too late for that.
• 4:56
  Yeah, fair point.
• 4:57
  Yeah.
• 4:58
  All right.
• 4:59
  So we've got, as always, our three sponsors who are at the top of the hour, and Bret's gonna lead us off today.
• 5:05
  Yes, I'm nothing if not professional.
• 5:07
  I've already got my glasses on and this is just one of our absolutely favorite sponsors of all time.
• 5:13
  Totally, yes, keeps the vampires away.
• 5:16
  It does.
• 5:17
  It does.
• 5:17
  And it tastes great.
• 5:19
  While keeping the vampires away, so it's like win-win except if you're a vampire, but you're probably not.
• 5:24
  So, Hope not.
• 5:25
  Or you'd know, and you probably wouldn't listen to this podcast.
• 5:28
  Our first sponsor is back with us for another growing and harvest season.
• 5:33
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• 5:35
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• 5:41
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• 5:44
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• 5:52
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• 5:57
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• 6:07
  The garlic is not a thing.
• 6:08
  They know garlic in all of its intricacies and who produce, that is the family, a diversity of garlics that is, in our experience, unparalleled.
• 6:19
  Good Lord, man.
• 6:19
  Did I write that sentence?
• 6:20
  Yes.
• 6:21
  You completely butchered it.
• 6:24
  I believe you wrote approximately that sentence.
• 6:27
  May I see it?
• 6:28
  Yes, sure.
• 6:28
  We love these guys' garlic.
• 6:30
  We really, really do.
• 6:31
  Where are we?
• 6:33
  Eat Sundries Farm garlic because this is a family farm of amazing people who care deeply about the land and their product, who know garlic in all of its intricacies and who produce a diversity of garlic that is, in my experience, and yours, unparalleled.
• 6:45
  That sounds more reasonable.
• 6:46
  Oh, your intonation made it sound like English.
• 6:49
  So, you know, kudos.
• 6:50
  But I did-- But seriously, buy their garlic.
• 6:52
  Yeah, buy their garlic and ignore my butchered adage. 73% of the world's garlic is produced in China and 80% of the garlic consumed in the US grown in China.
• 7:04
  Imported garlic is always fumigated with methyl bromide.
• 7:08
  What?
• 7:09
  Which is so toxic that it was phased out of use in 2005 in the US, except for, quote, "critical uses," and application to some agricultural products, including all imported garlic.
• 7:22
  Whoa, that is mind-blowing.
• 7:25
  In comparison, the amazing garlic from Sundries Farm is naturally grown on a four-year rotation with cover crops to suppress weeds and build soil.
• 7:33
  And Sundries Farm does everything by hand.
• 7:35
  Cloves are separated by hand for planting, hand-planted, hand-weeded, scapes are picked by hand, hand-harvested, hand-hung up to dry, hand-trimmed, hand-sorted, and a hand-packed, it's a labor of love, and it...
• 7:48
  Oh.
• 7:49
  Okay, hold on.
• 7:49
  You skipped half a paragraph that I'm gonna go back to.
• 7:52
  Okay, which one's the-- And I'm just gonna include.
• 7:54
  They grow 11 varieties of garlic, each one notably different, some mild, some hot, some ideal for baking, others great to eat raw.
• 8:01
  Some have huge cloves, others store for a very long time.
• 8:05
  Garlic takes on the terroir of its environment, and Sundries Farm in Idaho's rich volcanic soil is ideal for growing perfect garlic.
• 8:11
  You can now resume where you were.
• 8:12
  I would've gotten there.
• 8:13
  No, it's...
• 8:14
  (Laughing) You just skipped it.
• 8:16
  I wouldn't have gotten there, but in spirit, I believe all of that.
• 8:21
  So none of this incoherence is a result of eating their amazing garlic.
• 8:25
  No.
• 8:25
  The garlic cures such things.
• 8:27
  Oh yeah, totally.
• 8:28
  And actually, so-- This is the result of a deficiency.
• 8:30
  Bret's about to get there, but they're about to ship out this year's crop.
• 8:35
  So we have been suffering from a slight deficit in Sundries Farm garlic of late, and that may explain.
• 8:41
  My incoherence, absolutely.
• 8:43
  Hopefully it does not carry through to the rest of the podcast, but we will see.
• 8:48
  In comparison, the amazing garlic, did I already read that?
• 8:50
  Yes.
• 8:51
  We love Sundries Farm's Music garlic in potato salad, Chesnok Red garlic in Venezuelan green sauce, and Nootka Rose garlic in marinade for grilled chicken.
• 9:04
  It's all so delicious.
• 9:06
  It is also delightful to unwrap the different varieties of garlic and discover their secrets.
• 9:10
  Sundries Farm offers hardneck and softneck varieties, selling a year's supply of gourmet garlic for your kitchen, and also offering seed and gardening packages.
• 9:19
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• 9:25
  They grow one crop a year, and when it sells out, that's it for the year.
• 9:29
  Their 2026 crop was harvested in early July, cured for four weeks, trimmed, and shipments are going out now.
• 9:36
  Get your order in now before they sell out, which they will.
• 9:39
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• 9:48
  That's sundriesfarm.com, code DarkHorse.
• 9:51
  Check them out and get yourself some absolutely amazing garlic.
• 9:54
  That's sundriesfarm.com, and I will say, I actually enjoy the process of peeling garlic.
• 10:00
  There's something so cathartic and real about it.
• 10:04
  Yeah, you peeled like eight cloves from me yesterday when I asked for four.
• 10:08
  That is true.
• 10:09
  I also come from a household where the belief is typically the recipe calls for less garlic than you could use.
• 10:16
  Scared of vampires, were you?
• 10:17
  We were terrified of vampires, for good reason they're terrifying.
• 10:20
  They're terrifying.
• 10:21
  Yes.
• 10:21
  Okay, give that to me.
• 10:22
  Okay.
• 10:23
  I don't think you're-- I can't be trusted with it.
• 10:26
  Yeah, all right.
• 10:27
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• 10:30
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• 10:32
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• 10:34
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• 11:21
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• 11:25
  Dual Income No Kids, that's exactly it.
• 11:27
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• 11:27
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• 11:32
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• 11:34
  (Laughs) Okay, sentences that have never been uttered on this planet or any other.
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• 12:35
  Great job, didn't miss any paragraphs.
• 12:38
  You wouldn't know.
• 12:40
  I was counting from over here, but no, you nailed it.
• 12:43
  Was I giving an indication when I moved from one paragraph to the next?
• 12:46
  Because I was gonna comment on your ad read that most people don't actually enunciate the punctuation marks with, for instance, colon, saying colon aloud.
• 12:55
  Maybe you were just, you were getting ahead of yourself.
• 12:56
  You'd be like, well, but you have dose, maybe it's also good for your colon.
• 12:59
  They don't make that claim, I don't know if it is, but you were just kind of getting in the organ game.
• 13:03
  Yeah, something like that.
• 13:04
  Or just trying to overcome the flare-up of dyslexia that I sent a text to a group chat that I'm in yesterday and I used the term witting.
• 13:21
  But I don't know how to spell witting and apparently what the spell ticker-- Well, it's not a word, so I'm supposed to-- No, it is.
• 13:27
  Witting?
• 13:27
  Yes, this is the amazing thing.
• 13:29
  So I caused some confusion in research for what it was I was alluding to.
• 13:33
  In that case, I would search on unwitting and just take out the "uh." Yeah, yeah, eventually I got around to that maneuver.
• 13:39
  But what witting actually is-- Your microphone.
• 13:45
  (Keyboard Clicking) All right, can you now hear the discussion of witting?
• 13:52
  All right, good.
• 13:54
  What whiting turns out to be is two unrelated types of fish, one a cod, the other a hake.
• 14:01
  But it did not-- But it's not a word in the sense that you were trying to use it where you just take off a prefix and assume that the base word is a word.
• 14:08
  Yes, so I'm glad that we found my error.
• 14:11
  A cod and a hake.
• 14:12
  A cod and a hake.
• 14:12
  And neither you nor I are experts in the actinopterygians, the tens of thousands of species of ray-finned fish.
• 14:21
  Are a cod and a hake at all closely related to each other?
• 14:24
  No, I don't believe they are.
• 14:25
  Whiting.
• 14:26
  Whiting, yes.
• 14:28
  But that's sort of like a fish market term for it.
• 14:31
  I see.
• 14:31
  It sounds like a fish market term from the UK.
• 14:35
  Yes, it is, right.
• 14:36
  Does that sound like something you'd hear it say, "Pike Place?" No, no, sir, no.
• 14:41
  Do they even speak at Pike Place?
• 14:44
  Yeah, they yell when they've thrown a fish through the air, I think.
• 14:46
  That's true.
• 14:47
  Yes, as do the Swedes.
• 14:49
  I'm led to imagine by much watching of the Muppet Show.
• 14:54
  The Muppet Show.
• 14:56
  It wasn't Swedes, it was New Zealand.
• 14:58
  What?
• 14:58
  The fish throwing guy was from New Zealand.
• 15:00
  It was the Swedish chef and the fish.
• 15:03
  So I thought you said the puppet show.
• 15:05
  What puppet show are we talking about?
• 15:05
  You're talking about the Muppet Show.
• 15:06
  The Muppet Show, yes.
• 15:07
  It was a Swedish chef and a Norwegian fish throwing guy?
• 15:10
  No, an Australian.
• 15:10
  What did you say?
• 15:11
  He was Norwegian.
• 15:12
  I think he was Norwegian.
• 15:13
  I thought you just said Australian.
• 15:15
  I think I've said New Zealand.
• 15:17
  I don't remember.
• 15:18
  You said New Zealand.
• 15:19
  We are gonna find out in the comments what the hell he was doing and why he was throwing fish and where he was coming from, but we've digressed.
• 15:27
  So the Muppet Show would have been or would not have been acceptable now, given that most of its ethnic jokes were about white Europeans.
• 15:39
  It also made fun of monsters.
• 15:40
  Yeah, I think it would have been.
• 15:42
  Hyper acceptable, but it would have been destroyed by wokeness, which would have reared its ugly monstrous head in many a puppet, I'm thinking.
• 15:53
  Why did no one else understand, for instance, Kermit's adoration for Miss Piggy?
• 15:59
  Obviously, she's the most beautiful lady on the planet.
• 16:04
  Right, yes.
• 16:07
  Actually, she was ahead of her time, body positivity.
• 16:10
  Yes, now I see it, exactly.
• 16:12
  Right, and so mocking body positivity would not have been acceptable.
• 16:15
  Right.
• 16:16
  Right, okay.
• 16:17
  Let's do our final action today.
• 16:20
  I'm calling, call it a week.
• 16:22
  Call it a week.
• 16:23
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• 16:44
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• 16:47
  Is it Xlear or is it Maybelline?
• 16:50
  (Both Laughing) There it is, that's what it looks like.
• 16:52
  Oh yeah, there it is.
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• 18:03
  What?
• 18:04
  Ah, I just, we've arrived at the end of the,(Phone Ringing) yeah, it reads the green border has disappeared.
• 18:11
  The green border has disappeared, but you were giving me such,(Laughing) such a crazy look.
• 18:17
  My goodness.
• 18:19
  I don't know when those crazy looks come out.
• 18:21
  I think you've discovered that over many years.
• 18:23
  That you don't know.
• 18:24
  I don't always know.
• 18:25
  I have discovered that you say you don't know.
• 18:28
  All right, fair enough.
• 18:29
  (Laughing) Sticking to the facts, are you?
• 18:32
  Yes.
• 18:34
  Well, and actually that, I mean, that's a good segue here because I mean, so we're gonna talk about this model mostly that you and to some degree I am developing, but first let's just walk through some of what we think.
• 18:47
  We know right now everyone watching probably is familiar with the story, but if this gets listened to in a month or six months or a year, hopefully this will fade it into, have faded into memory.
• 18:59
  So the idea that claims about your experience, claims about your skills and accomplishments are sufficient to describe reality, is actually not the case.
• 19:18
  Sorry, I was thrown by something going on on the screen here.
• 19:21
  So let us actually go to this Sarah Ditum article August 7th, no, from July 6th.
• 19:31
  We're gonna just walk through a little bit of what has been thought about.
• 19:37
  No, that's actually the, that is the August 17th one.
• 19:42
  Oh no, I guess this is right.
• 19:44
  Okay, so let me just, you can leave that up there, but the Times of London has published many, many pieces about Jason Arday beginning back in 2023, I think beginning back in 2023 when he was appointed to his professorship at Cambridge.
• 19:59
  And Sarah Ditum wrote a piece on July 6th.
• 20:02
  It was a book review of his then forthcoming book.
• 20:05
  I don't actually know if the book's been pulled or not, which was being sort of eviscerated by many in the media for its obvious shortcomings and apparently blatant falsehoods.
• 20:19
  And then he apparently killed himself on August 14th after having resigned his professorship.
• 20:27
  And three days later, she writes this piece, which is titled, "Was it wrong to write so much about Jason Arday?" And she does a good job right up top of just describing what some of the situation was.
• 20:38
  So let's start there.
• 20:39
  "Being at the center of a media storm is isolating and horrible, but the academic plagiarism had become a serious story that deserved scrutiny." So that's him.
• 20:48
  "By Jason Arday's own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life.
• 20:52
  He had tumors in his brain according to his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, which I reviewed for the Times, and one in his testicle, according to the proposal for that book.
• 21:00
  He was randomly beaten up by four youths, leaving him with epilepsy.
• 21:04
  I could find no contemporary reports to corroborate this.
• 21:07
  He was hit by a car and comatose for months.
• 21:09
  Another story that was in the proposal, but not the final text.
• 21:13
  Unpicking the truth or otherwise of these claims has become a national sport over the last four weeks.
• 21:18
  Arday's biggest piece of bad luck that was unquestionable.
• 21:21
  It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer when parliament is closed and the news agenda is a vacuum.
• 21:29
  The sub-stack post by Nathan Cofnas that initiated Arday's fall was published on July 21st, one day after Andy Burnham became prime minister and two days after the World Cup final.
• 21:38
  As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about." So here she has a picture of the book that she reviewed.
• 21:43
  Again, I don't know what the status of it is at this point, if it's going to come out.
• 21:48
  There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions running 600 miles in six days and 30 marathons in 35 days, some with a broken leg, obviously ridiculous.
• 21:57
  When the Guardian's Lanre Bakare, apologies for butchering the name if I did, investigate some of Arday's more Baroque claims of harassment and found they didn't stand up, Arday's response was hilarious.
• 22:07
  To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me.
• 22:10
  Wow.
• 22:11
  So that's one take and there's much more to be said, and I do intend to say some more.
• 22:20
  But let's also show this video that you showed us, that you showed me from Trafalgar Square, apparently yesterday or the day before, at a memorial for him.
• 22:36
  Yeah.
• 22:36
  I gather.
• 22:40
  So what if we say,"Professor Jason Arday?" Professor Jason Arday.
• 22:50
  I'm sorry, because I don't believe that.
• 22:54
  I live down, and I'm sorry because I have a feeling that people will take it here.
• 23:02
  So there are people who are gathering in the at least hundreds.
• 23:07
  Thousands, I would say.
• 23:09
  Probably thousands.
• 23:12
  To chant the name of the now deceased, much maligned, much criticized, former Cambridge professor, Jason Arday, when essentially no one has made a compelling argument since the accusations of plagiarism and fabulism have come to light, that he wasn't in fact a plagiarist and a fabulist.
• 23:40
  So he became an image for those who have been criticizing woke and DEI, because it was so obvious.
• 23:58
  He was not worthy of the adoration happening at Trafalgar Square any more than George Floyd was, right?
• 24:05
  Well, actually, can we show some images of the George Floyd protest, so we can just see how reminiscent these things actually are.
• 24:14
  So here you have, remember George Floyd being held up at the head of a march.
• 24:18
  People of course masked this being 2020.
• 24:24
  No justice, no peace, a threat with a picture of George Floyd, silence equals violence with the black power hand.
• 24:33
  Okay, another one of these iconic pictures of George Floyd hoisted high over this crowd, defund the police, black lives matter prominently displayed.
• 24:48
  And racism is a pandemic.
• 24:51
  This is 2020, and here you have this clash of these giant news stories and an attempt to pull them into one thing or to pull rank or whatever it is.
• 25:06
  Well, and as we talked about at the time, you had in the wake of George Floyd's death at the very end of May of 2020, a letter signed by, I believe, hundreds of medical professionals claiming that actually the real pandemic was racism.
• 25:22
  And thus justifying all of these in-person events, which also at the time we said, well, they're outside.
• 25:29
  They're not actually probably going to cause many health issues regardless of what turns out to be true about COVID, unless it's a way more explosive pathogen than even those who think it's the worst it could possibly be are claiming.
• 25:45
  But just weeks before that, there had been people who were trying to gather to protest the lockdowns, for instance, and those people were told that they were killing grandma.
• 25:55
  So the hypocrisy, the inconsistency was stark then.
• 26:01
  And this move to agilate, to in memoriam, wash away all of his sins of Jason Arday feels similar.
• 26:16
  Now, was everything that he said a lie?
• 26:18
  No, no, clearly not.
• 26:21
  That doesn't make him a scholar or worthy of an academic position, especially not one so esteemed, once esteemed, still esteemed for some reason, in institutions Cambridge.
• 26:31
  But clearly he benefited from what we came to know during our own time in front of the woke DEI people when we were still at Evergreen, he came to be benefited from the progressive stack, very much so, and he played it up.
• 26:52
  And so there's been much said about how this, his death was the result of white supremacy.
• 26:59
  Well, he was black and he talked about that a lot, but he also at the point that he was not being believed, he also claimed that he wasn't being believed not just because of racism, but also because of basically ableism.
• 27:13
  And I don't know if he ever used that word in particular, but he referred over and over and over again to his autism.
• 27:19
  And of course, there are many claims that he has made not having been verbal until 11 and not having been literate until 18 while he was also apparently already being a philanthropist at 17.
• 27:31
  Like there's all sorts of crazy inconsistencies in his stories and how you end up with professorship at Cambridge in your mid thirties when you couldn't read or write when you were 18 seems inconsistent at best.
• 27:48
  But he claims for instance, that the reasons for some of the errors in his dissertation is that he wasn't supervised well enough.
• 27:56
  As if not having been supervised well enough is any sort of an excuse as if a PhD is inherently about the people who were supervising you as opposed to you whose name is on it, right?
• 28:09
  So I wanna jump in there for a second.
• 28:13
  This is gonna come a little out of order, but there is something about the way woke unfolded in the academy that is particularly telling.
• 28:25
  And so the idea that he wasn't supervised enough, I think is actually right.
• 28:31
  But the point is-- I mean, I think it's true.
• 28:33
  When you look at the specifics, one of his professors just like left the university and it never got replaced and one of them, I mean, like I think that's actually true.
• 28:42
  But I don't even mean-- But it doesn't matter.
• 28:44
  I don't mean it at that level.
• 28:45
  It does matter, but it doesn't matter in the way that the people who are saying it or Jason Arday having said it mean it.
• 28:52
  The whole idea in the academy is that if you come from a protected class, then there are no standards.
• 29:02
  The standards are inherently removed.
• 29:04
  And so-- In modern academia, that's not how it's supposed to be.
• 29:08
  Right, oh, of course not.
• 29:09
  No, no, this is my point is that what Woke has done is it has decided inhabiting these positions is something anybody can do.
• 29:18
  The idea of having some sort of a standard to which people are held and some people will not meet is incorrect.
• 29:25
  We wanna get as many people into these positions as possible, move them as high into the hierarchy as we can.
• 29:31
  We're not going to judge what they're doing.
• 29:33
  So the point is what you see when you look at what Cambridge did is an institution falling all over itself to embrace whatever he says.
• 29:41
  And that was the racism.
• 29:45
  Right, it's the-- I mean, not that there isn't racism on the right.
• 29:49
  I mean, we have these race realists and these would-be eugenicists for sure on the right.
• 29:54
  But Cambridge was engaging in racism as well.
• 29:57
  Right, it's the tyranny of low expectations or whatever the exact phrase is.
• 30:01
  But so I do think there is a tragedy here and maybe more than one.
• 30:09
  But the tragedy is in some sense, they opened a niche.
• 30:15
  Jason Arday explored just how big that niche was, I think by making stuff up and seeing if anybody would call him out.
• 30:24
  Now, is he a good guy for doing that?
• 30:27
  No, but the point is, don't you dare blame the guy who explores the niche without noticing that somebody opened that niche and the whole tragedy actually belongs to them at the very least.
• 30:42
  They're at the top of the stack here, not, you know.
• 30:46
  And once you have such a thing, and if you've looked, if you've listened to Dark Horse or other podcasts on the subject, you've heard many readings of papers that have been published in supposedly peer-reviewed journals that mean nothing.
• 31:02
  People literally studying their own masturbation as a dissertation topic.
• 31:07
  There's no standard being applied and that no standard being applied, you know, it's funny sometimes when somebody puts something through that's absolutely ridiculous.
• 31:19
  But the point is you're expecting somebody to have read his work and, you know, critiqued it.
• 31:27
  How would that be possible in light of the revolution that basically decided, hey, we're gonna suspend the standards for some people and that will be a good thing?
• 31:38
  The answer is no, it's not.
• 31:39
  And here it's resulted in a suicide.
• 31:41
  That's, you know, tragic, but it's not the tragedy, it's not the narrow tragedy they want us focused on.
• 31:47
  It's a much bigger tragedy because what you do, well, you wreck the university system in the process.
• 31:52
  Yeah.
• 31:53
  So a couple more things I wanna go through before we embark on the model.
• 31:57
  And one, you just remind me of.
• 31:59
  So this Nathan Cofnas guy who published the sort of big expose that apparently got this whole thing started in July in his Substack, which is very long.
• 32:11
  He's got, so I'm not gonna scroll all the way up to the top to show you again, but he says he's describing Arday's work.
• 32:18
  He says, how much of Arday's work is like this?
• 32:20
  Having gone through, can you see my screen?
• 32:21
  (Mumbles) He says, having gone through and basically checked the plagiarism in the dissertation of which there is ample, ample evidence, he says, how much of Arday's work is like this?
• 32:39
  He says, on his Cambridge University faculty webpage, Arday lists 10 publications under the heading principal and recent publications.
• 32:46
  And so Cofnas then just goes through those 10.
• 32:48
  And I'm not gonna go through all of them.
• 32:50
  I'm gonna go through a couple and then show you his summary of the 10 at the end.
• 32:52
  This is again, the work that Arday was most proud of at the point that he was putting this on his Cambridge faculty page.
• 33:00
  Now the first one from 2018 called understanding race and educational leadership in higher education, exploring the black and ethnic minority experience, which involved Arday interviewing, quote, three black and ethnic minority academics and senior leadership positions within higher education in the UK.
• 33:18
  The three individuals were selected, quote, because of their convenient accessibility and proximity to the researcher, end quote.
• 33:25
  Arday asked them to quote, reflect on and write about their experiences in the getting racism within the academy, end quote.
• 33:31
  This short paper quotes and summarizes the responses and asserts that racism is a serious problem in academia.
• 33:37
  Okay, the second one on Arday's own list of the work that he was most proud of dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity and negotiating normative whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial microaggressions within the academy, he's just got all the words in there, published in whiteness and education, which is yes, apparently a real journal.
• 33:57
  Arday's own abstract includes, quote, this paper employs a critical race theory, a storytelling method, which Cofnas says [sic], like that's not English, but okay, which operates as a counter narrative and attempting to conceptualize my own professional experiences of negotiating normative whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula with a racial micro-, micro aggression, the narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in which racism unfolds within the academy and the nuanced everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of whiteness, on and on and on and on.
• 34:35
  This one did have a fair bit of plagiarism, apparently from a 2012 paper, all the yellow is actual like word for word plagiarism and the green stuff is slightly rephrased.
• 34:47
  Okay, so he goes through, he does this for the 10 pieces of scholarship that Arday was most proud of and ends up at this summary is Arday a real scholar.
• 34:57
  He highlights these 10 papers in which Cofnas finds evidence of clear evidence of plagiarism in four of them.
• 35:05
  He finds no data or scientific analysis in, let's see, that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of them.
• 35:14
  And in three of them, including the two that have absolutely no data or scientific analysis, he didn't actually write them or do the work.
• 35:23
  And what Cofnas has this as his minimal contribution, he was either one of three corresponding authors, a non-corresponding author or one of six non-corresponding authors in which the contributors notes suggest little or no real contribution.
• 35:35
  So this is the work that Arday was most proud of.
• 35:39
  And if I can have my screen back just for a second pull up this article I wanna share.
• 35:47
  The Times of London in the wake of Cofnas' big reveal, and you can show this if you like, in the wake of Cofnas' reveal interviewed Arday.
• 36:03
  This is from July 31st, 2026.
• 36:06
  And also kind of reviewed what the evidence was.
• 36:11
  The title of this piece being Jason Arday, I am not a liar, says star academic accused of plagiarism.
• 36:17
  The youngest ever black professor at Cambridge University claims allegations he is a fraud are cruel, racially motivated and do not account for his autism.
• 36:24
  So right there in the subtitle of the piece, he's playing the progressive stack.
• 36:29
  He's like, not only am I black and that's why you hate me, but I'm autistic and that's why you can't understand why I did what I did.
• 36:35
  He said cruel.
• 36:37
  Cruel, racially motivated and do not account for his autism.
• 36:42
  Okay, so I'm just, I've got a couple pieces highlighted here that I, it's a long piece that we're gonna focus on.
• 36:50
  He attributed some errors in his early academic work to his autism, saying that his method of making sense of information relied heavily on mimicry.
• 36:59
  He argued that if anyone's academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny, it would show similar errors.
• 37:06
  Now, I remember this thinking.
• 37:09
  From the wake of Evergreen blowing up on us.
• 37:13
  It really actually seemed that a lot of these absolutely fraudulent academics who appear never to have had an independent thought or even interpreted an argument in a new way that someone else had made, they actually believe that yes, they are to some degree just kind of skating on, you know, whatever reputation they have, but isn't everyone doing that also?
• 37:39
  They actually appear to believe that no one is doing real work.
• 37:44
  And that is the house of cards that this entire thing is built on.
• 37:48
  All right, hold on, I wanna say a couple things.
• 37:50
  Yeah.
• 37:51
  One, the claim is overdrawn, but I don't think he's wrong.
• 37:56
  Which claim?
• 37:57
  The claim that, well, several claims.
• 38:02
  The idea that this is cruel, racially motivated, and that this is happening because you're scrutinizing his work.
• 38:13
  The point I would make, which is an uncomfortable one, which you will find not exactly in either of the camps that you would imagine somebody has to land in, is the job description that people see published and the actual job that you've been hired to do are often very different.
• 38:32
  I believe he was actually hired exactly what he was doing, that the DEI woke academic industry is involved in producing a lot of things in the form of scholarly work that seem to make the same claims again and again without validating them because they can't be validated.
• 38:53
  And a long time ago, 2017, I called this idea laundering.
• 38:59
  That the idea is you have some idea that you want to lodge, you know, imagine that they somehow intuited that AI was coming.
• 39:07
  And so what you wanted to do is produce a lot of stuff that reaches a particular conclusion so that the AI would become convinced of it.
• 39:14
  People crowd sourcing their opinions on things is like a crude primitive AI.
• 39:19
  And so I think he was doing what they effectively hired him to do.
• 39:23
  We want you to put out a certain number of papers a year.
• 39:26
  The direction that those papers should point is quite obvious.
• 39:31
  And, you know, do it however it gets done.
• 39:36
  And plagiarism is an obvious way to do this.
• 39:38
  Participating in papers where you didn't actually contribute anything is also an obvious thing, which happens all over the academy.
• 39:46
  Looking up people and finding three who are close to you and will make it easy to abroad and just talking to them for a bit.
• 39:53
  And I mean, there's nothing scholarly or academic in that endeavor at all.
• 39:59
  Right, but if you did do, and I said this, I keep mentioning this, but it's important to me.
• 40:05
  As I said to Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay back when they revealed their hoax to us, the flaw in your methodology is that you didn't try this on the sciences because it would actually pass muster there.
• 40:19
  You'd have to come up with things that, you know, were tighter in terms of their claims.
• 40:25
  But absolute garbage flies all the time in the sciences.
• 40:28
  Just witnessed the fact that the biology departments and medical schools all signed on to the gender madness.
• 40:35
  So nonsense is everywhere.
• 40:37
  And Arday is not wrong that, hey, you've pointed the microscope at me and found stuff, but if you pointed that microscope elsewhere, you'd find a lot of that same stuff.
• 40:46
  But that's not what he claimed.
• 40:48
  Like, I agree with you to a limited extent.
• 40:53
  He says, well, and this is the Times of London paraphrasing what he said to them.
• 40:59
  They write, he argued that if anyone's academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny, it would show similar errors.
• 41:06
  That's right.
• 41:06
  That is not true.
• 41:08
  That is complete bullshit.
• 41:11
  The entire academic landscape is not built on shadows and gossip.
• 41:17
  It's just not.
• 41:18
  Now, what good work has been, what fraction of the work that is being done in academia in the last 50 years is actually substantive and testable and based on reality?
• 41:29
  Unfortunately, I would say it's well less than 50%.
• 41:31
  And?
• 41:31
  But the idea that everyone is doing this and therefore the only thing different about me is that you looked at me is absolutely wrong.
• 41:40
  Well, it's not absolutely wrong.
• 41:42
  He's the direction, the quality of scholarship is going down in part because DEI has breached every field.
• 41:49
  And so you now have a chaos of standards where there are standards at all.
• 41:56
  He's not right that you would find the same thing in his work as everybody else's because I believe he was a good bit more extreme in his fabulism than most people could even be.
• 42:06
  But there were also people who just don't do that like you and me and many, many others.
• 42:10
  Yes, but we're not in the academy anymore.
• 42:12
  And part of, and the story of why we're not in the academy anymore is tied up in this, of course.
• 42:18
  So anyway, there's a lot of garbage.
• 42:20
  He's not literally right that everybody is doing this.
• 42:23
  And he was indeed extreme.
• 42:26
  I think we can be quite certain of that.
• 42:28
  But there's also content in what he's saying, which is that part of what you are experiencing is that you've scrutinized me and you haven't run the control.
• 42:38
  And it would be a shame to miss that part of the point.
• 42:43
  That's the tragedy here is that, yeah, somebody effectively took over the academy and has been dismantling it, which of course-- Some thing, some movement.
• 42:54
  Some thing of which he was one of the foot soldiers and his entire scholarship was to say these things.
• 43:03
  To the degree that those 10 pieces of work of which he is most proud say anything, what they say is racism is alive and well in the academy.
• 43:13
  Like that is the message.
• 43:15
  And so this is just him doing what he was doing.
• 43:19
  And uncomfortable as it is, I think he was doing what he was hired to do.
• 43:25
  Yes, I think, yes.
• 43:27
  So he also says, "There has been since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well orchestrated and coordinated campaign to unseat me from my position," he claimed.
• 43:35
  "The motive is racially motivated.
• 43:37
  I think there's a reason why it's me.
• 43:38
  And I do think that reason is aligned to ableism and racism." I just want to point out again, he goes back over and over and over again to the progressive stack.
• 43:46
  There are always identity claims rather than self sufficiency or responsibility for your own actions claims.
• 43:58
  He apparently never does this.
• 43:59
  That's Cofnas, the author of the piece that sort of facilitated this whole brouhaha.
• 44:06
  Another paragraph from this Times of London piece that is actually pretty measured, but announces itself as an interview with Arday, of which there are just some pieces.
• 44:19
  "Part of Arday's defense against a complaint of plagiarism at Liverpool John Moores University," which is where he earned his PhD, "was to point to alleged racism, saying that a misconduct panel should consider the political extent," no, the political context of a war on critical race theory.
• 44:34
  So this is just tying everyone in knots.
• 44:37
  Like all you have to do is say that and you have to back off if it's a black man saying that.
• 44:43
  The university set up the panel.
• 44:44
  This was long before this summer.
• 44:49
  The university set up the panel, which cleared Arday after complaints were received last year.
• 44:54
  Arday's work contained passages that were identical or highly similar to the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers at Brunel University student published six years earlier.
• 45:03
  The statistical chances of Arday using the same words have since been calculated to be one in 100 billion.
• 45:10
  Although Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, he defended himself by saying he'd received inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism and quote,"complex learning disabilities," end quote.
• 45:21
  He said the panel should also consider insidious and relentless strategies to remove black academics by discrediting their work under the guise of academic integrity.
• 45:29
  The panel concluded in March that the citation issues are a result of quote,"honest and reasonable error," having been presumably bullied into concluding that, and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was quote,"well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time." So academic standards of the time, therefore, if this is true, are worth nothing.
• 45:55
  Yes.
• 45:55
  We cannot assume that anyone with any degree has learned anything in their university, and there's a good chance that they have come out stupider and less able to do analysis than they went in.
• 46:08
  Yep.
• 46:09
  If something that is plagiarized to an extent that the chance of it happening by chance are one in 100 billion is now by the university, who yes, I'm sure was bullied into taking this position, is saying this was well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time, well, you've just told us that academia is dead.
• 46:31
  Yeah, you just told on yourself.
• 46:32
  That's what you told us, right?
• 46:33
  Yep.
• 46:34
  Okay, so another couple of sections from this piece in the Times from July 31st.
• 46:44
  He said the papers were peer reviewed, but errors slipped through and there had been big improvements in his work over time.
• 46:49
  This is criticism of some of his earlier work.
• 46:51
  "At the stage I'm at now, if I write something, I can afford a proofreader," he said.
• 46:55
  "You'll see there's a very big difference between the work I wrote post 2021 and the work I've written up until now.
• 47:00
  My writing is a lot better, purely because I can afford a proofreader to read through everything I've done and sharpen up the language." Again, there's so much wrong here.
• 47:09
  Yep.
• 47:10
  Academics, most of us don't have proofreaders.
• 47:14
  We don't have ghostwriters.
• 47:16
  We don't have other people checking our work because what you are as an academic is an intellectual who is responsible for your own thinking and your own communication of your thinking.
• 47:26
  You do not rely on outsiders to make sure that what you said is actually coherent English.
• 47:30
  Apparently he always needed to.
• 47:32
  Furthermore though, a proofreader is doing kind of copy editing work.
• 47:36
  And yes, there are plenty of grammatical errors in everything he says and writes as far as I can tell.
• 47:41
  And that's something that a proofreader could catch even though he shouldn't have ever needed it.
• 47:45
  But what he needs is someone to actually come in and do his thinking for him.
• 47:50
  The editing, he needed editing.
• 47:51
  He didn't just need proofreading.
• 47:53
  And so like, I don't know if he didn't understand the difference or if this was just sort of a faint to obscure the difference between those two things, but it's a real and important one.
• 48:02
  Well, he needed mentoring.
• 48:05
  He needed education.
• 48:06
  And the fact that the woke revolutionaries have destroyed education at every level makes this a tragedy but not the one that people imagine it is.
• 48:17
  So, you know, it's tragic that this guy would, I mean, I don't know whether this guy, having been given decent mentorship early on might have found that he had a talent for something and not needed to lie.
• 48:29
  But what happened was this niche got opened up and mentorship didn't exist and the ability to critique somebody who was black didn't exist.
• 48:38
  And so this is the product of that.
• 48:41
  But the product of that is not, hey, this professor sitting in this, you know, amazingly prestigious seat is actually not doing any work and may not be capable really of doing work.
• 48:54
  The failure is so much broader and the tragedy is so much more dangerous than that, you know, vignette.
• 49:00
  Yes.
• 49:01
  Okay, one more bit from this.
• 49:04
  And this gets to some of his fabulism around his physical prowess.
• 49:11
  He was apparently a marathoner.
• 49:13
  He did have real physical skills and he had in fact been, I think, like a PE teacher and early on when he was still supposedly nonverbal or not literate, he was earning, I don't remember the UK words for this, but effectively for what the equivalent of high school graduation was, one of the two citations he got in a good way was for PE.
• 49:39
  So that said, he's claimed, you know, having run 600 miles in six days and 35 marathons in 30 days and 30 marathons in 35 days.
• 49:49
  Sorry, wouldn't want to exaggerate his claims.
• 49:53
  So again, this from the Times of London piece about him from July 31st.
• 49:58
  Arday has faced questions about his claims of extraordinary endurance running challenges, which he said raised up to 5.5 million pounds for charity.
• 50:06
  "I can't make people believe me," he said.
• 50:08
  "Nobody lives their life having a receipt for every single thing they say or they've done." He stood by his record of running 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days on the treadmill and 600 miles in 12 days, which is itself a change from what his earlier claims have been.
• 50:22
  And this is part of what he was doing.
• 50:23
  Every time he'd say something again on the same topic.
• 50:27
  He wasn't even tracking his own claims.
• 50:30
  Or I don't know if he wasn't tracking his own claims.
• 50:33
  And this is to the point that's gonna happen here.
• 50:37
  He didn't expect any of the rest of us to be tracking his own claims.
• 50:40
  One, because that's not how the world often works.
• 50:43
  Everyone's too busy dealing with their own stuff to track other people's claims.
• 50:47
  And also because all you had to do was cry racism or ableism and it got people to back off from being skeptical of his claims.
• 50:54
  So he said that he did not raise all the money for charity but was part of a syndicate of about a hundred people.
• 50:58
  But when he spoke at events or to the press, the coverage focused on him.
• 51:02
  Asked what he did not correct the narrative, he said, "Could I have ever guessed that somebody would literally come through every single word I've ever said on that?
• 51:09
  There's no way because I never, ever guessed I'd be in this position." So what he's acknowledging there is that he knows he lied.
• 51:18
  At least in this case, he knows, and I think this was one of the things that had emerged before he died, before he killed himself, that the claims of him himself having raised so much money for charity was not actually true.
• 51:34
  But he was part of endeavors such that collectively it's impossible to know how much he was responsible for but that he was involved in endeavors that did help raise money for charity that were associated with him running, doing distance running.
• 51:45
  I believe that all of that is true.
• 51:47
  But what he's saying here, there's no way because I could I ever guess that somebody would literally come through every single word I've ever said on that.
• 51:54
  Well, the thing is, if you're not lying, it doesn't matter if they do.
• 51:59
  We all misspeak and you and I, Bret, have been in front of the camera for way too many hours and we both misspoken and we both said things that later like, "Ah, that wasn't right." And when it's anything of any import, we come back and say,"Yeah, that wasn't right." But there are also little things that will disappear into the stream and then someone can come back and say, "Oh, you said that." It's like, "Oh, I guess I did." Yep, sorry about that.
• 52:24
  And so you could see a legitimate way that someone could be like, "Gosh, yeah, I said that.
• 52:29
  That was an error and I was wrong." But that's not what he's doing.
• 52:34
  This is over and over and over again, almost everything that can be found of what he had said was some kind of either outright fabrication or a tweaking of the truth so massive, honestly, that all it took was being familiar with what actually happened to say, "That didn't happen." And when asked, "Why didn't you correct the record?" Because that's what we all must do.
• 53:00
  That's what academics must do for sure, but that's what we all must do is correct the record when we have said something that's not true.
• 53:07
  He didn't say,"I'm sorry, I should have." He didn't say, "I forgot I'd said that, no, I'm going to correct the record now." What he said was, "I didn't think you'd check." Yep.
• 53:21
  That's an indictment of the human beings' morals and ethics if nothing else.
• 53:28
  Right.
• 53:29
  On the other hand, morals and ethics come about because your developmental environment reinforces them.
• 53:35
  And I wanna make sure that responsibility for this lands in the right place.
• 53:41
  You've got people who suspended the rules, for anybody from certain demographics who did any kind of breach of our contract with each other.
• 53:51
  And so, yeah, I agree.
• 53:52
  That starts for him in his late 20s.
• 53:55
  If we believe him about his development, his actual development environment, he's the son of a strong African woman who's teaching her sons that women aren't gonna take care of him and he's nonverbal and he's nonliterate and that's his development environment.
• 54:11
  Right.
• 54:11
  He doesn't have academia until- It's been 10 years before he attains Cambridge.
• 54:16
  I'm not talking about academia.
• 54:17
  I'm talking about the developmental environment that has done the same thing with K through 12.
• 54:25
  Civilization has embraced a bunch of nonsense that has removed standards from a set of people who are now suffering from the fact that they were never exposed to those standards.
• 54:35
  And it's criminal, it's also extremely dangerous.
• 54:39
  And it's, there's no- I don't know what aspiration means if you don't know what a standard is.
• 54:47
  I don't know how it is that you aspire to anything, as he clearly did, as we all should.
• 54:52
  If there's no metric, if there's no bar, if there's no standard, if there's nothing to aspire to, you cannot aspire.
• 54:59
  So I don't accept this.
• 55:00
  I don't know what it is that you're not accepting.
• 55:03
  I'm saying that development matters tremendously and the developmental environment has been systematically disrupted by a revolutionary force that has betrayed all of the people who will not benefit from the standards that might have been exerted in their presence and caused them to aspire in some different way.
• 55:24
  But this man did aspire.
• 55:25
  So I feel like you are speaking to the people who have failed to aspire, of which we see so much of it.
• 55:30
  You go to downtown Portland, or Seattle, and you see these faculties of homeless people who've just given up on trying to be anything in their lives, and it is a damn shame.
• 55:40
  And they are still ultimately the ones responsible for their own lives, but that is a failure of developmental environment and civilization and the schools and all of this.
• 55:50
  This is a human being who did choose to aspire.
• 55:53
  What was he aspiring to?
• 55:57
  I don't know why we're disagreeing.
• 55:59
  Somebody opened a niche.
• 56:00
  He couldn't have opened it.
• 56:02
  He inhabited it and rose and was celebrated and all of the trappings that would usually accompany accomplishment, and what he was really accomplishing was being a figurehead in a revolution that needed someone who looked and sounded like him to inhabit a chair or a seat at the most elite college in the world, arguably.
• 56:23
  Yeah, so at some level, what he's saying here is, but I was promised all the goods.
• 56:30
  I was promised the throne.
• 56:31
  Yeah, he got every signal that he was doing it right.
• 56:35
  Yeah, but I guess he speaks in a language that seems, he speaks about meritocracy.
• 56:41
  He speaks about merit.
• 56:42
  All right, can I say-- As if he knows what the word means.
• 56:44
  Right, can I say something terrible that I think is true, but it's just awful.
• 56:51
  He was Cambridge's mascot.
• 56:53
  He was like a pet.
• 56:55
  He was like somebody they could trot out and bring to dinners and he would do tricks for them.
• 57:00
  And the point is your pet has certain expectations, right?
• 57:05
  They were treating him in this way because he was doing something for them.
• 57:09
  And so he was reaping the rewards from doing what he had been asked to do.
• 57:14
  And I do think that's a freaking tragedy.
• 57:16
  I agree, that is a tragedy.
• 57:20
  I think you're right, it does sound horrible.
• 57:22
  And I think you're right.
• 57:23
  He was effectively their mascot.
• 57:25
  He was effectively their pet, but he was also a man.
• 57:28
  He was also a human being.
• 57:29
  But my point is the men we admire, get there through a route that punishes them for doing the wrong thing, for taking the shortcut, for being cowardly, whatever it is, and rewards them when they delay gratification and they invest in something and they tough it out and all of the things that turn you into a man.
• 57:54
  And if you create the developmental environment that does the inverse of this, you will get the inverse.
• 58:00
  And I, you know, yeah, the lies were extreme.
• 58:05
  And that-- But it's not, it's the justification on the basis that he didn't expect anyone to check and he didn't know this was wrong.
• 58:19
  Right.
• 58:19
  That I am objecting to.
• 58:23
  Well, I don't know what there is to object to.
• 58:25
  My point is you got the guy you ordered and some of us were complaining about it.
• 58:31
  But I mean, I think maybe we're just talking about, you're talking about the system having created this, having looked for exactly this man and they found him and they helped create him.
• 58:40
  Yeah.
• 58:40
  And they got him.
• 58:41
  And now they've got a right mess to clean up and they're not gonna do it.
• 58:45
  And I'm talking about the individual human being who still, no matter what, has agency, has an ability to look out from those eyes of his brain no matter how dumb or smart he actually was, right?
• 58:59
  And say, I aspire.
• 59:01
  Hi, I wonder what that word means.
• 59:03
  You aspire to something.
• 59:04
  You can't merely aspire.
• 59:06
  Aspire is not an amorphous state of being.
• 59:09
  You have to aspire to something.
• 59:11
  No.
• 59:11
  He appears to have been aspiring to never having been checked.
• 59:14
  Like that's not a thing.
• 59:15
  It doesn't make sense.
• 59:16
  He was rising and he was learning how to rise in a system that was rewarding garbage.
• 59:23
  And my point is, look, we know people who are ambitious, that that's the thing.
• 59:32
  That's true.
• 59:33
  Right?
• 59:33
  And that they are not trying to be accurate.
• 59:36
  And when being accurate allows them to rise, they are accurate.
• 59:39
  And when asked what they want to accomplish, they just say something like success.
• 59:42
  Right, and so-- That's actually, that's true.
• 59:44
  I think that is true.
• 59:46
  And I think the point is he was ambitious and the story, first of all, the people who created the niche that explains why we're discovering that there's a Jason Arday or was at the top of Cambridge and that his work didn't stand.
• 1:00:03
  He was rising at the, one of the finest universities in the world.
• 1:00:10
  The reason that we are discovering that has to do with scrutiny being placed on him when the system, I mean, do you remember when Evergreen melted down and the assumption was, "Wow, wonder what went wrong at Evergreen?" It's like, it's not what went wrong at Evergreen.
• 1:00:28
  Evergreen was the more colorful version of something that is essentially universal in the academy.
• 1:00:32
  And wait five years and you'll discover that.
• 1:00:36
  But the point is the colorfulness of Arday is like the colorfulness of Evergreen, right?
• 1:00:42
  A generic version of this story is playing out every university in the West every day of the year.
• 1:00:48
  And letting the people who allowed that happen to escape on the basis that Jason Arday is a very colorful and now tragic story is an error, I think.
• 1:01:00
  So I'm concerned about that.
• 1:01:03
  I also want, can we look at the video of Nathan Cofnas?
• 1:01:10
  I have a very brief video of him.
• 1:01:13
  So this again is the academic who wrote the piece on his Substack in mid-July outlining all of the problems with Arday being in the position he was.
• 1:01:27
  Yeah, he's a PhD background in biology.
• 1:01:32
  Let's listen to him.
• 1:01:33
  Yes, and that sort of thing.
• 1:01:36
  Now Arday was special.
• 1:01:37
  The reason Arday is getting a lot of attention is he took the plagiarism, which is fairly common in academia, too far.
• 1:01:48
  And he told these crazy lies about his personal life.
• 1:01:54
  And he had such an exalted position that the mismatch between the quality and the prestige was so enormous that there was a hook for a story.
• 1:02:09
  That was special about him.
• 1:02:10
  Not that he's a fraud, not that he's a worthless scholar.
• 1:02:14
  It's that there was a story.
• 1:02:17
  There was a basis for a news story that would capture people's attention.
• 1:02:21
  But there are so many cases of people who are just like Arday, but there isn't that kind of story potential.
• 1:02:33
  Well, maybe the lesson is this what's happened if you don't give Cofnas a job, right?
• 1:02:39
  Yeah, you got your own ways to retaliate.
• 1:02:41
  What are you gonna do, do you think?
• 1:02:42
  Are you gonna finish your PhD?
• 1:02:43
  Or no, you've already finished it.
• 1:02:45
  You're just gonna-- No, I finished a long time ago, yeah.
• 1:02:47
  Yeah, so what are you gonna do?
• 1:02:49
  Well, I have the job currently, and I'm still waiting for the revolution to happen, and then I'll get another job.
• 1:02:59
  After the revolution, I'll be the head of the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard.
• 1:03:07
  (Upbeat Music) Oh, good.
• 1:03:10
  Yeah, oh, good, exactly.
• 1:03:12
  So I feel listening to that.
• 1:03:14
  For one thing, there are points he made in there that I agree with.
• 1:03:18
  The idea that what really makes this story interesting is the gap between the assumed quality of what goes on at Cambridge and the de facto quality of this particular scholar.
• 1:03:29
  But-- Right, it's an issue of scale rather than type.
• 1:03:32
  Right.
• 1:03:33
  Yeah.
• 1:03:33
  So, but here you have a guy who admits he has an ax to grind.
• 1:03:40
  Okay, fair enough.
• 1:03:40
  Admits that this was a story with a hook.
• 1:03:45
  He's like, this is not uncommon, but this story had a hook.
• 1:03:48
  It was the gap between what's assumed to be taking place and what's actually taking place.
• 1:03:52
  And of course, his last line there is delivered tongue in cheek, right?
• 1:03:56
  When the revolution comes, he's gonna be the chair of the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard.
• 1:04:02
  Okay, so this is a guy, I would argue, that he has a very extreme position at the other end of the spectrum from woke.
• 1:04:12
  And it is not the alternative to woke.
• 1:04:16
  It is actually a rather remarkable position, one that would make most people who think about these issues quite uncomfortable, and I think rightly so.
• 1:04:26
  So anyway, the dis-- So when-- Well, I mean, you don't joke about chairing the Department of Eugenics and Race Science if you don't think those are interesting true topics.
• 1:04:37
  Right, and actually-- And he does.
• 1:04:38
  And he, I think he classifies himself as a race realist.
• 1:04:41
  These are people who believe that IQ differences between populations are the result of basically genes.
• 1:04:54
  And I would point out, I've been trying to argue that the evidence actually suggests that while there are IQ differences between populations, that the most rational interpretation of the evidence suggests that they are actually developmental, maybe not entirely, or maybe entirely.
• 1:05:13
  But the idea that this is simply genes, and therefore, oh, by the way, there's nothing we can do about it, so why would we even try, is profoundly distorting of the landscape in exactly the inverse way of the woke movement, which basically claims that competence is an illusion promulgated by white people to keep everyone else down.
• 1:05:34
  So weird that we have extremists on both sides.
• 1:05:38
  I'm not saying that the race realists don't have an analytical contention that could be tested, and I'm not saying that they are not proceeding.
• 1:05:48
  It's certainly a hypothesis on the table with regard to what differences between races can be attributed.
• 1:05:53
  As would be the woke position if they knew enough to phrase it as such.
• 1:05:59
  As is development, perhaps, as a downstream of culture, a hypothesis or a couple of sub hypotheses.
• 1:06:07
  Right, okay, but the discovery that the guy who set this in motion has a racial ax to grind and thinks in terms of revenge for his failing to get a position, it's a little bit damning, and it makes the entire story read differently to me.
• 1:06:31
  Somebody triggered this, and it was focused on Arday, because by his own analysis, there was a hook in that story where in the case of most of the people inhabiting this niche, there isn't a proper hook, like Evergreen.
• 1:06:42
  Yeah, so you pointed to me to this piece in the Byline Times, which is an outlet I'm not previously familiar with.
• 1:06:53
  It's very left-leaning.
• 1:06:55
  The title is, and it's from yesterday, August 18th, 2026.
• 1:07:00
  The title, it's called "Reportage, Special Investigation, the Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday." And it basically makes people guilty by association.
• 1:07:15
  Yep.
• 1:07:16
  And I do think having an ax to grind, having a position that you were trying to verify with examples that you find, is not a scientific approach, but this is also not a scientific approach, very much so.
• 1:07:32
  And I'm not gonna read any of this really, but we'll post it.
• 1:07:38
  It is making connections, like in this guy once showed up in an event with this guy, and that makes all of them guilty.
• 1:07:46
  And you don't like Peter Thiel to you, and you don't like Donald Trump to you, and like these people, I've said that they support these people, therefore you know they're wrong.
• 1:07:53
  And then the middle of it, it pretends to go after the actual claims against Arday.
• 1:08:00
  And it does a terrible job, because frankly he's not defensible.
• 1:08:03
  Right. Right?
• 1:08:03
  You know what, it says things with regard to like the marathons.
• 1:08:08
  In fact, maybe if you're talking at some point again, I'll find it in here, but it says, here's the evidence that he did all those marathons.
• 1:08:16
  Like, well, they're only, it's only his say so in each of these cases.
• 1:08:20
  Like there's links to news articles in which he says, "Hey, I did it." Like, well, okay, but we know he says things, right?
• 1:08:27
  Right.
• 1:08:27
  So that doesn't constitute evidence, and frankly, what Cofnas apparently does believe, but regardless of what he does, it does not believe.
• 1:08:36
  The analysis that he did of, just to take this tiny piece of the analysis, he did, you know, the entire thing that he did was I thought very well done, and that analysis of the 10 papers that Arday himself cited as the ones of which he was most proud, that wasn't his language, but he went through paper by paper and found failing deep, irredeemable, failings in all of them with regard to them being evidence of Arday being a good scholar.
• 1:09:04
  So that's actually evidence.
• 1:09:06
  Even if you don't like the guy it came from, doesn't matter.
• 1:09:09
  Right, it's evidence.
• 1:09:10
  Even if he was looking for exactly what he found, that does mean that you should be more skeptical and you should perhaps fact check what he has found more often than when you are reading the work of someone who's saying, "I actually went in with no dog in this fight," or "I went in hoping to find the opposite, but here's what I found." Like those biases, those pre-existing biases going in do make it easier to read the work without having your skepticism dialed up to 11 the whole time, but this piece in the Byline Times has exactly the opposite expectation going in, and it does a terrible job of actually providing evidence that having been associated with people we don't like and Reform UK and Restore Britain, oh no.
• 1:09:57
  Like these are clearly evil people.
• 1:09:58
  Well, aren't they, Bret?
• 1:09:59
  Are these evil people?
• 1:10:00
  Not am I.
• 1:10:01
  No, they are not.
• 1:10:01
  Yeah.
• 1:10:02
  Right, so guilt by association is not a legitimate evidentiary claim.
• 1:10:06
  Right, but I do, this is slightly unfair to Nathan Cofnas, but there is an analogy back during the OJ saga.
• 1:10:22
  OJ's legal team made the argument that racism was, of course, at play.
• 1:10:30
  I just did it, didn't I?
• 1:10:33
  It was in play.
• 1:10:34
  They may have made the argument that it was at play.
• 1:10:36
  It wasn't me, it was them who said it, which they probably didn't.
• 1:10:38
  But anyway, the point is they pointed to racism as a contributing factor to why OJ was on trial.
• 1:10:47
  But then do you remember what happened?
• 1:10:49
  This was back in the early 90s.
• 1:10:50
  Yeah, do you remember what happened as the background of the, I think he was the lead investigator on the case was explored?
• 1:11:02
  He turned out to be a white supremacist unambiguously, if I remember correctly.
• 1:11:07
  Oh yeah, I think that is right.
• 1:11:08
  And so you've got a story that unfortunately is not the clean story of, okay, this guy killed his ex-wife and her companion and then cried racism.
• 1:11:21
  The answer is yeah, sure look like he killed his ex-wife and her companion and there's a surprising level of racism inside the LAPD that just happened to be lead on the case that night.
• 1:11:35
  And that's an ugly set of facts to have to juggle.
• 1:11:39
  And in this case you have somebody who's pretty clearly a remarkable fabulist, found in the most remarkable of places and you also have somebody who decided to highlight the situation because he's got an axe to grind and by the way, he's got an analytical perspective which he sees as part of a revolution, which is really the counter revolution to woke.
• 1:12:08
  And so anyway, wow, this is a story that sure seems unnuanced to a lot of people and wouldn't you know it, it's just not as clean as one would hope.
• 1:12:22
  It's not as clean and by treating it as one of the cartoon versions of the story, we end up missing the real story which is, while we were all mostly sleeping, somebody destroyed the academy without replacing it on behalf of civilization.
• 1:12:40
  Like, oh my God, that's the story.
• 1:12:45
  Yeah, all right, so shall I?
• 1:12:49
  Launch.
• 1:12:49
  Launch into this model that I promised to provide.
• 1:12:52
  Yes.
• 1:12:52
  Okay, so the model has to do with fanaticism which is a term that I think ought to be prominent in our thinking because we are seeing fanaticism breakout all over the place on numerous different topics at once which raises a question, why is that happening?
• 1:13:12
  All right, so I would argue that you don't typically find fanaticism of this sort when you're dealing with simple fundamental things, right?
• 1:13:23
  It's possible to be just simply right about simple things.
• 1:13:28
  Where we find fanaticism is where you have complexity and that means that what is true, the truth of some system is rarely perfectly one-sided, right?
• 1:13:41
  You know, is socialism a good thing or a bad thing?
• 1:13:45
  Well, socialism as a system is a terrible thing.
• 1:13:49
  Socialism as an ingredient, actually we all like the fact that when we dial 911 that competent people show up and save us from a medical catastrophe or a fire you know, having gotten trapped under our car or whatever it is, right?
• 1:14:03
  So that sure looks socialist to me.
• 1:14:06
  So, you know, there's nuance there.
• 1:14:08
  Complex systems tend not to be black and white in this way.
• 1:14:14
  The process therefore should, when you have a complex phenomenon in which there is nuance you will tend to have a spectrum of opinions.
• 1:14:26
  It will range from extremes on either side to a lot of intermediate positions.
• 1:14:31
  And in a sufficiently complex case, you know you may not have the same position as anybody else because you've weighted the things differently.
• 1:14:40
  So there tends to be a spectrum of beliefs.
• 1:14:46
  So the centerpiece of the model is the idea that there is a filtering process, an evolutionary filtering process that causes beliefs to become extreme, beliefs that may not start out especially extreme.
• 1:15:02
  And I'm borrowing here a little bit from an idea that was initially put out by Eliezer Yudkowsky years ago as part of the sort of rationalist dialogue in which he used the example of a cult.
• 1:15:17
  And in this cult, there's a prediction of the end of the world, particular hour of a particular day.
• 1:15:27
  The hour arrives, the world does not end.
• 1:15:31
  What happens next?
• 1:15:32
  Well, you had a spectrum inside the cult of people who were just absolutely unshakable in their belief all the way to people who were like, yeah, this seems right, but I don't know.
• 1:15:44
  I've got doubts, maybe I don't share.
• 1:15:47
  Well, the doubters will tend to leave in such a circumstance.
• 1:15:50
  And what that does is it concentrates within the cult.
• 1:15:54
  It concentrates the true believers.
• 1:15:57
  It concentrates the verificationists.
• 1:15:59
  Exactly.
• 1:16:01
  The falsificationists leave with each passing, one of these failures of prediction.
• 1:16:09
  Right.
• 1:16:09
  Oh, well then, I guess this isn't true after all.
• 1:16:13
  And so it becomes a radicalizing process that is actually the result of game theory.
• 1:16:20
  And Eliezer Yudkowsky analogized it to evaporative cooling, where basically in his model, you have particles of different levels of energeticness and the more energetic ones tend to bounce out of the system leaving the less energetic ones.
• 1:16:39
  So you get a physical cooling.
• 1:16:41
  So that is analogous to the radicalizing of the folks who happen to inhabit some sort of an extreme position.
• 1:16:57
  They come to believe that something is true.
• 1:16:59
  Evidence arises that it isn't true.
• 1:17:02
  And instead of it causing them to rethink their position, it causes them to double down and may even drive them further into that position, which is surprising to those of us who are watching it.
• 1:17:12
  How much drug abuse and crime would you need to see on the streets of Seattle before you began to contemplate that maybe this wasn't a simple lack of housing issue?
• 1:17:25
  Right?
• 1:17:27
  Something should alert you or how many, how far would your tax base have to collapse before you realized that your beliefs about how to raise more revenue by, you know.
• 1:17:42
  Chaotically taxing the rich.
• 1:17:43
  Chaotically taxing the rich was actually counterproductive to maintaining your city.
• 1:17:50
  I have an answer.
• 1:17:51
  Do you?
• 1:17:51
  We're not there yet.
• 1:17:52
  We're not apparently not.
• 1:17:53
  Well, and what will bring you there is the collapse of the system.
• 1:17:57
  Yeah.
• 1:17:57
  Right?
• 1:17:58
  But if you ask yourself, why do the West Coast states look the way they do?
• 1:18:02
  In part, it's because you have a system that looks suspiciously like a physical system in which those particles that are most troubled even go to some state where they're treated better, leaving the true believers in charge of everything.
• 1:18:23
  And it's even worse because in the physical evaporative cooling model, the particles don't vote.
• 1:18:29
  Well, and this analogy also works strictly within politics at the moment with our two-party system where the Republican party is a mess, but it's also kind of incompetent because it's got so many of these escapees at this point that everyone's an individual, an individualist.
• 1:18:51
  And so it's hard to reach consensus when your population is filled with individualists.
• 1:18:56
  And the Democratic party over the last many decades has become more and more homogeneous, uniform, a focus on community, on the collective, on frankly communism, and what does that do if not, like all you have to do is put the word out, like this is how we vote, okay, this is how we vote.
• 1:19:16
  And it's a, they're foot soldiers and they are foot soldiers that police each other's thought.
• 1:19:23
  So if you were a cryptic, if you were just a little bit cowardly and you were a skeptic, you would actually fear going to the voting booth and voting as you actually felt because then you're gonna be in the position at the cocktail party where you're-- There was a cocktail party with you.
• 1:19:40
  I think it's the iconic way to think about this because if you imagine somebody contemplating, you know, voting the wrong way in a particularly, you know, Chardonnay blue Volvo circle, right?
• 1:19:54
  Then they're going to-- Two of those things do not go together, by the way.
• 1:19:58
  You don't drink the Chardonnay while you're in the Volvo.
• 1:20:01
  No, you drive yourself home and you have the glass of Chardonnay.
• 1:20:04
  But we have digressed, wittingly.
• 1:20:11
  But point being, if you were gonna vote your conscience, you would fear being outed.
• 1:20:19
  Yeah.
• 1:20:19
  You know, when at the cocktail party, everybody is virtue signaling about how they voted and you know, how they felt doing it and all of that.
• 1:20:26
  And you're not gonna be that compelling because you frankly lied about who you voted for and then suddenly the suspicion is gonna fall on you.
• 1:20:32
  So really the easy thing to do is just to vote for the stuff whether you're skeptical of it or not because what difference is it gonna make?
• 1:20:38
  This is an aside, but that was part of the brilliance of the Spencer Pratt campaign running for mayor of LA.
• 1:20:43
  That many of his ads were playing on this, knowing that there were groups of people, a couple in therapy, women at a Pilates studio who were secretly ashamed but knew that they were doing the right thing and then it emerges that actually everyone in the room voted the same way because we can all see that the emperor has no clothes and we are not gonna be ashamed of it anymore.
• 1:21:06
  And of course then he, you know, I think had the election stolen from him.
• 1:21:10
  Right, but the point is he was responding in a game theoretically coherent way which was to create a large enough zone so that each person who voted as they wouldn't have imagined they would vote would have a community of other people who had done the same, right?
• 1:21:25
  So very clever on his part.
• 1:21:28
  But all right, back to the model.
• 1:21:30
  So you have this evaporative cooling phenomenon that will penetrate people of extreme beliefs.
• 1:21:37
  Those people will punish nuance.
• 1:21:41
  And we've seen this so many different times where the idea is there's some thing being voiced.
• 1:21:47
  And if you say, "Hey, wait a minute, that's not how it works," then suddenly you're the enemy.
• 1:21:52
  And so here's the hallmark that has emerged in my consciousness of late.
• 1:21:59
  There is a moment, I feel like what you and I do all the time, what we do with our friends is we talk about how things are, why they are the way they are.
• 1:22:10
  It's an analytical discussion.
• 1:22:12
  There's no point at which somebody who's actually acting in good faith in that analytical discussion becomes morally suspect for disagreeing.
• 1:22:24
  In fact, it's interesting when somebody who's acting in good faith who you respect enough with has arrived somewhere else.
• 1:22:30
  At least one of you is wrong.
• 1:22:32
  And there's something there for it to be learned.
• 1:22:35
  But the experience for somebody who tries to do the analytical work on any one of these topics that have been evaporatively cooled, the experience is, "Wait a minute, why am I suddenly defending my decency?
• 1:22:50
  Why is my morality in question?" And this is the hallmark.
• 1:22:56
  You can watch it happen.
• 1:22:57
  There's some question.
• 1:22:59
  Is the evidence consistent with the official narrative or is it more consistent with a conspiracy?
• 1:23:06
  That's an analytical question.
• 1:23:07
  But if you are on the wrong side of it, the suspicion about you is that you are morally defective.
• 1:23:13
  There's something wrong with you that you would see it that way.
• 1:23:16
  And the wrong thing is not about analytical disagreement.
• 1:23:19
  It's not about the weighting of evidence.
• 1:23:21
  It is about your character.
• 1:23:23
  Because there's a fundamental belief in the foregone conclusions.
• 1:23:28
  We already know what is right.
• 1:23:30
  Therefore, if you have concluded something else, you are in the wrong.
• 1:23:35
  Absolutely.
• 1:23:36
  Which results then in an amplifying process.
• 1:23:42
  As anybody who expresses skepticism or a difference of opinion in one of these environments pipes up, they are punished.
• 1:23:52
  And so the point is they are either driven out or they are driven into the mainstream of their little collective.
• 1:24:00
  What that does is it creates an environment in which the analytics aren't analytical.
• 1:24:07
  It creates teams.
• 1:24:10
  You're on an analytical topic.
• 1:24:11
  And the point is, well, okay, there's a lot going on here.
• 1:24:14
  There's a lot of different pieces of evidence that we should be discussing and trying to figure out how to extrapolate from them.
• 1:24:20
  But the point is as soon as you go anywhere near something that is not on the official list of accepted things, then the point is, wow, suddenly, your friends don't wanna talk to you.
• 1:24:33
  You're not invited to the party because you're not vaccinated, whatever it is, the punishment comes.
• 1:24:39
  And so most people in the face of that punishment probably correctly reason that there's very little they can do to carve out a space for nuance.
• 1:24:49
  And there's a whole lot they can do to destroy their life by sticking to it.
• 1:24:54
  They abandon ship and they sign up with one of these team-based perspectives that is almost by definition going to be wrong.
• 1:25:06
  Go ahead.
• 1:25:06
  I'm just, this is a side thought, but traditionally the four, traditionally academia has been broken up into sort of four big areas, at least the letters and sciences, liberal arts.
• 1:25:23
  Put aside engineering and medicine and whatever business, like the schools that end up being called professional schools.
• 1:25:30
  But the liberal arts have been split into the sciences, now often called like natural and physical sciences, the so-called social sciences, the humanities and the arts.
• 1:25:45
  And in sort of that order, I think there's a, maybe a changing ratio of emphasis on analysis to narrative.
• 1:25:58
  And yeah, these are topics I've been thinking about a lot with regard to this book I'm writing and the need for all of us to shift between these modes.
• 1:26:05
  We all need both modes.
• 1:26:07
  And I'm not being very precise about what I mean by analysis nor narrative here, but you're using analysis in this way that I was thinking, okay, well that begins to explain to me why the social sciences get to call themselves sciences, which I've never really appreciated.
• 1:26:23
  With an undergraduate degree in anthropology, who then went on to get a PhD in biology, my feeling was anthropology was pretty awesome when I had the right professors, but science it was not.
• 1:26:33
  Physical anthropology, sure, but cultural anthropology is not science.
• 1:26:36
  It's not the same kind of thing.
• 1:26:37
  You don't have the same standards of evidence, of hypothesis, of prediction, of even usually, any kind of quantitative analysis.
• 1:26:47
  So if you accept this sort of like natural and physical sciences into social sciences and to humanities and arts as a changing ratio of analysis to story, and it doesn't quite work for arts because art isn't story exactly, but it's the least analytical and the most sort of intuitive.
• 1:27:06
  And so another place that we can play with these ratios and shifting back and forth is the explicitly intuitive.
• 1:27:12
  And so the hard sciences are the most explicit of the academic professions.
• 1:27:18
  And you go over into the humanities with literature, which I've also spent some time in, in philosophy and history and say, "Okay, well, there's some, with regard to history, there's things that happened, but what does it mean?
• 1:27:32
  And how do we know?" And like, it gets, you get into the realm of epistemology, which the sciences need too, but how is it that we're making claims of truth, gets a lot more squidgy when you're towards this end of the humanities and arts part of the spectrum.
• 1:27:46
  And part of what I think has happened with regard to the universities is that the social sciences, which I've usually called the so-called social sciences because I have not understood why it was that they got to call themselves scientists at all, they were the ones who took over, right?
• 1:28:03
  It was sociologists and psychologists and anthropologists and economists to some degree, who really, who, from which, and, you know, maybe someone like, I don't know, the French school, if some of those people called themselves humanities types, but they took over and they destroyed the value of analysis from the inside and they then tried to make this spread out.
• 1:28:26
  And this is part of what Arday's so-called scholarship reveals.
• 1:28:29
  Like there's no analysis there.
• 1:28:32
  When Cofnas goes through and looks at those 10 papers of which Arday was most proud of and says, "Well, I think it was like seven of them had no evidence of data or hypothesis testing." What he's saying is there's no analysis.
• 1:28:47
  It's entirely story.
• 1:28:50
  And there is value in story.
• 1:28:52
  Story is fundamentally human, but it doesn't have any place.
• 1:28:56
  It doesn't have primacy of place in anything that gets to call itself science.
• 1:29:02
  It is still part of all scientific endeavor, but it can't be the only thing.
• 1:29:06
  And that is one of the things that the woke revolution has won with.
• 1:29:10
  The idea of lived experience is sufficient.
• 1:29:13
  Do you have lived experience?
• 1:29:14
  Yes, you do.
• 1:29:15
  Is your story real?
• 1:29:17
  Yes, it is.
• 1:29:18
  Is your interpretation of your story the only true interpretation?
• 1:29:20
  No, it is not.
• 1:29:22
  It is also not evidence that what else you claim as a result of that story or that experience that you had is true.
• 1:29:28
  And that's where we see Arday's claims over and over and over again.
• 1:29:32
  There was, maybe there still is a branch of literature that applied scientific reasoning, like sex ratio theory, game theory, and evaluated stories based on...
• 1:29:50
  I was planning to do an Evergreen program on this, actually teach an Evergreen program.
• 1:29:53
  So in part, what you're getting is postmodern story.
• 1:30:00
  Story that has no obligation to be tethered to reality in any way, it's aspirational.
• 1:30:04
  It's about a world that doesn't exist.
• 1:30:06
  Has staged a revolution against everything, including the hard sciences by undermining, it's basically pulled an HR move on the sciences where it's infused people who can't be judged and who do not aspire to discover, they're not truth-seeking.
• 1:30:31
  Or create.
• 1:30:32
  Right.
• 1:30:32
  Discover or create, both of which are admirable and honest ways to make a living in academia.
• 1:30:38
  Humanities and arts being more often the creative endeavors.
• 1:30:41
  But it has also destroyed storytelling, ironically.
• 1:30:44
  Yes.
• 1:30:44
  Right?
• 1:30:45
  The garbage that comes out of Hollywood is unwatchable because really what it is is a bunch of lecturing us on our moral state.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah, and I mean, the young adult section in Powell's, what was once I think the best bookstore in the universe, is now just a nightmare of DEI wokeism.
• 1:31:06
  It's appalling.
• 1:31:07
  Yeah.
• 1:31:10
  All right, so let's just say that this process that has, again, the thing we're trying to explain is why there are so many fanatics on so many different topics.
• 1:31:22
  Fanaticism should be rare, and yet we find it across many different topics.
• 1:31:27
  I think part of this I'm maybe least certain of is that fanaticism tends to create its mirror, right?
• 1:31:38
  So we have fanaticisms that are unique unto themselves, but given time, I believe they create their mirror.
• 1:31:46
  And the hallmark of a system that has been divided in this way is that everybody hates the middle.
• 1:31:53
  Now, I hate hearing myself say that.
• 1:31:55
  I do not think of myself as a centrist.
• 1:31:57
  What I typically say is the center is not where the truth is, the center is where we meet to discuss what's true, which I think is the right way to think about it.
• 1:32:06
  But if you imagine that there's a process that actually drives the poles farther away from each other by virtue of them demonstrating to themselves that they're actually of the real belief, they believe in the platonic ideal of woke or whatever it is, then they become disconnected.
• 1:32:24
  There's no nuance allowed, which means that the middle ground is hated by both sides.
• 1:32:30
  Yes.
• 1:32:30
  Right?
• 1:32:30
  So let's take the example of the wokes on one side who believe in a postmodern reality in which there is nothing to be judged because all claims are not really truth claims, they're power claims, right?
• 1:32:45
  Okay, I get it.
• 1:32:48
  It's laughable except they've gotten a long way with that.
• 1:32:51
  Right, and so amongst those claims, maybe the primary among them is that the differences in capacity between people are power, just reinforcing itself, claiming that these people have capabilities, that those people don't, and so you could infuse whoever you wanted through whatever institutions you had, and you could just basically rearrange who gets the paychecks and nothing's gonna change because they weren't doing anything in the first place, right, that's a very extreme position.
• 1:33:18
  The bridges will start falling down.
• 1:33:20
  Well, in reality space, the bridges will start falling down, but the problem is the folks who have been punished by Wokeism have rebelled into extreme understandings of the world that they live in and the belief that in fact not only are there profound differences in the capacities between individuals and yes, between populations, but that those things are the result of DNA differences about which we can do exactly nothing and therefore there is no reason to even worry about anything.
• 1:33:56
  Let's just have meritocracy and we'll have the lame people fall to the bottom and it will be what it is.
• 1:34:03
  And the problem is there is of course a world of alternative possibilities in which the differences in capacity are the result of various factors.
• 1:34:14
  One, the wokes have more of a point than it would be good if they had.
• 1:34:19
  There is a lot of cheating and a lot of the people who are declared competent in our meritocracy aren't actually competent.
• 1:34:28
  If you're inside of science, you see this.
• 1:34:30
  You have lots of PhDs who don't know much about anything including their own fields.
• 1:34:36
  So that's phony, but it is also true that you can have profound differences that are the result of developmental phenomena which are amenable to interventions.
• 1:34:48
  And so the idea that there is either one thing to do and that's reapportion the positions and just imagine that competence doesn't exist or the other thing to do is just ignore it all because the only thing that exists is competence and the only place it comes from is genes, right?
• 1:35:01
  They're both extreme.
• 1:35:02
  Yes, they're both extreme.
• 1:35:04
  All right, and we see this, you know, let's see the vaxxers versus the anti-vaxxers.
• 1:35:10
  Let's put it in the COVID context, okay?
• 1:35:12
  You had people who were like, you must get the vax, right?
• 1:35:16
  The vax is the thing, the vax is the answer to the pandemic, you've got to get it, right?
• 1:35:21
  And then you have the anti-vaxxers who in this case, I think turned out to be completely right.
• 1:35:29
  I hesitate to say that because this model suggests that you should have extremists over there, but I think the extremists actually turned out to be the centrists really, but there is a middle ground you would have expected to see lots of people inhabit, right?
• 1:35:46
  I am pro-vax, but I've had COVID, therefore for me, I'm anti-vax.
• 1:35:51
  Those people almost didn't exist, right?
• 1:35:54
  Those people were driven, you know.
• 1:35:56
  We weren't allowed to hear from them because that wasn't an allowed position.
• 1:36:01
  Because it was immoral.
• 1:36:02
  It was immoral.
• 1:36:03
  And the point is you have two sides that come to believe the other, anybody expressing something that is not their own position is morally broken, all right?
• 1:36:12
  We have this with respect to what I would call the division between traditionalists, conservatives, who would like to bind us to the existing rules, the rules that brought us here, versus a kind of libertarianism in which anything goes, right?
• 1:36:34
  There's a lot of middle ground between those two things in which you can serve a certain amount, you allow for a certain amount of progressivism, okay?
• 1:36:45
  We see the same thing, climate science versus do what you like to the environment, right?
• 1:36:52
  What we don't have is a room inside of climate science for somebody to say,"Yes, we're having an effect on the climate, "but it's far less severe than is being portrayed." And we have the elevation of people who suggest that it's much more extreme than we even know.
• 1:37:09
  And with regard to that example, I think it's telling, like it's so clear to people that you're only allowed to have one of two positions with regard to climate science, that I have actually been taken to task for disbelieving all that we are having an impact on the science, because what I have done is critiqued some of the existing climate science.
• 1:37:32
  And there's never been a moment since I first started thinking about the climate many decades ago that I have assumed that people weren't having an effect, that is there was an anthropogenic effect on the climate.
• 1:37:45
  I also do not trust the work that is being published for many of the reasons that we're talking about today with regard to the state of the academy and what you are and are not allowed to say, but it's become such an absurd moment with regard to the inability for people to stake out a position in the middle, such that when you hear, when someone hears a position that allows them to potentially be slotted in either side, it is assumed that they are on that side.
• 1:38:12
  And so, and we saw this during COVID a ton.
• 1:38:14
  If you do not think that the vaccine is the right treatment of COVID, you don't believe in COVID.
• 1:38:21
  What?
• 1:38:22
  I didn't say that.
• 1:38:22
  What are you talking about?
• 1:38:24
  If you think that much of the research finding that rising CO2 levels are going to cause rising sea levels that will make many American cities unlivable by 2070, then you do not believe in any form of anthropogenic climate change.
• 1:38:39
  No, that's not what I said, but I understand why you might come to that conclusion based on this model that you were putting forward.
• 1:38:46
  Right, and the point is it creates a very simple litmus test that forces people.
• 1:38:51
  It drives them to be at least understood to be part of a position that in a natural analytical consideration would have a wide spectrum of opinions.
• 1:39:03
  It's the dichotomizing of every question.
• 1:39:10
  And you know that you're morally suspect as soon as you analytically stray, that's a non sequitur, right?
• 1:39:18
  It doesn't say anything about my morals that I disagree analytically, but it will be portrayed that way because that will explain why there's no need to humor.
• 1:39:28
  And go ahead.
• 1:39:29
  This feels related to me of a point I've made before to not just biology, but sort of cultural analysis more generally.
• 1:39:37
  And specifically it's been a critique of the woke left, but they seem to want to find binaries in all the places where there are no binaries.
• 1:39:47
  And the only place they reject binary is this where they exist, which is to say in sex.
• 1:39:52
  Yep, that's exactly, exactly correct.
• 1:39:54
  Now, the problem for them, those who do this, is that ultimately you do face the collapse of your city, right?
• 1:40:04
  You keep doubling down and becoming more extreme and doing more and more of the stuff that got you in trouble.
• 1:40:09
  And if you don't recognize that you're being driven away from reality by becoming extreme, then eventually you're left with a city in chaos, right?
• 1:40:22
  So there is a point at which the thing runs its course and the insane people get their comeuppance.
• 1:40:32
  At which point there's another phenomenon which I've pointed to somewhat regularly that I call the middle ground scramble, right?
• 1:40:39
  So the middle ground scramble is the result of an interesting pair of phenomena.
• 1:40:44
  One, if you're the person trying to say something reasonable that does not fall into the established camps, if you're trying to carve out nuance the reality of the situation, you are then morally demonized.
• 1:41:01
  You are a heretic and you are cast out.
• 1:41:05
  At the point that you are cast out, there's no route back.
• 1:41:10
  That is odd.
• 1:41:12
  If I turn out to be right about something where you freaked out, then at the point that it turns out that you adopt my position, then the point is, well, I guess he was right about that.
• 1:41:24
  And I guess he was right about that.
• 1:41:26
  Ought to be a process from which one could learn not to do the same thing again.
• 1:41:34
  But the typical thing is heretics are never redeemed.
• 1:41:38
  Why aren't they redeemed?
• 1:41:39
  They're not redeemed because the accusation was turned into a moral accusation, right?
• 1:41:45
  If this was held to an analytical question, then the point is, hey, I deserve credit for having been right when you thought that was insane.
• 1:41:53
  Now I get to trade on that credit.
• 1:41:57
  But you were disloyal.
• 1:41:58
  Yeah, and not only disloyal, but just simply unforgivably bad.
• 1:42:04
  And so there is no return for the heretics.
• 1:42:09
  And what that does is the most maddening thing of all.
• 1:42:13
  At the point that the folks who got it wrong are revealed to be wrong, the heretics are not redeemed and allowed to say, oh, actually, maybe you should listen to me the next time.
• 1:42:24
  What happens is the true believers who got it wrong then scramble for a new nuanced position, right?
• 1:42:34
  They do not want to credit the heretics.
• 1:42:37
  What they want to do is now scramble for power by staking out the new position.
• 1:42:43
  And we saw one of these, I think last week.
• 1:42:47
  You wanna play the video of AOC?
• 1:42:54
  I have a local city councilman that has this saying, Woke 1 was crazy.
• 1:43:02
  (Laughing) Woke 1 was crazy, okay, that's interesting.
• 1:43:05
  And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what expanded this thing.
• 1:43:09
  Did the movement go too far with some of those positions?
• 1:43:11
  I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.
• 1:43:15
  Well, I think that during this time and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window.
• 1:43:25
  We were shut down.
• 1:43:26
  There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns.
• 1:43:30
  And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.
• 1:43:40
  And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.
• 1:43:47
  I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right?
• 1:43:55
  And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible.
• 1:44:00
  I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.
• 1:44:08
  And I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment.
• 1:44:17
  We didn't have access to all of the positions.
• 1:44:21
  The only position we had access to was no more police.
• 1:44:23
  I never heard anyone say, you know what we could use right now is more police, which is probably what exactly what we could have used.
• 1:44:29
  Yes, or my position, which never caught on, which is some cops are bastards.
• 1:44:35
  We should probably do something about those cops so that the force functions better, but no room for- You need a new acronym is the problem.
• 1:44:42
  Yes, totally.
• 1:44:44
  But Woke 2 is gonna be amazing.
• 1:44:47
  (Laughing) Popcorn now.
• 1:44:50
  Yeah, but I mean, Stephen listened to her.
• 1:44:52
  I mean, look, credit where credit's due, she's very good at inhabiting the role she's in.
• 1:45:01
  Yeah, and she's no idiot.
• 1:45:03
  She's no idiot.
• 1:45:04
  I think she's ambitious in the worst sense of the term and that she recognizes that, you know, you've sort of ridden this horse as far as it'll go and it's time for a different horse.
• 1:45:17
  So there has to be some sort of, you know, the laughing acknowledgement.
• 1:45:21
  Well, we all understand that, you know, Woke 1 was a little crazy and it's like, well, do you remember what you said about us when we said it was crazy in real time?
• 1:45:32
  When we pointed to the harm, when we pointed to all of the danger and the fact that the bridges were gonna collapse and that you were gonna destroy the academy and all of the things- So more than the people who disinvited their family members to Thanksgiving because they didn't get the COVID shots, remember that.
• 1:45:45
  No one wants to have their past brought up to them when they were being complete idiots.
• 1:45:52
  Yes, right.
• 1:45:54
  And so the important part of this is that there are certain hallmarks to a discussion that is not functioning by the analytical rules, right?
• 1:46:05
  One of the hallmarks is that things are pushed over in moral space very quickly.
• 1:46:10
  Another hallmark is that the heretics are never brought back and dusted off and they don't get an apology because the accusation was moral.
• 1:46:18
  And the point is, well, it's assumed you're still morally broken, even if you were right, right?
• 1:46:23
  So those things tell you it's not a normal landscape.
• 1:46:28
  The fact that you are forced into an extreme position and that your attempt to bring nuance is punished.
• 1:46:37
  That's such an interesting phenomenon because nuance is of course what you need.
• 1:46:41
  It's the entire reason that we have an academy is to figure out what the nuances are and how we can evaluate the way they interact, right?
• 1:46:49
  To figure out what is actually true.
• 1:46:52
  It's not supposed to be a team sport.
• 1:46:54
  And this team sport thing is, I believe, creating fanatics out of regular people on topic after topic by virtue of the game theory that underlies it.
• 1:47:07
  And I would also argue that this is why, this is why the speech question matters so profoundly.
• 1:47:16
  And it's not so much about the right to say unpopular things, that that's obviously vital, but also just the ability to say uncomfortable things in the environment of battling fanatics who wish to drive out those who are committed to analytics.
• 1:47:36
  And really, as I've said before, I don't think it's an accident that our mechanisms for seeking truth have all been targeted.
• 1:47:47
  That our newspapers, our courts, our universities, all of these things are incapable now of doing the job that is so vital, which is to sort out what is true when the answer is not obvious.
• 1:48:01
  And the jeopardy to civilization is profound, but also the opening that that provides for the powerful.
• 1:48:11
  The wokes are, by and large, pawns in a game that is empowering those who already have much power and do not wish to be questioned over what's actually true.
• 1:48:21
  So my hope is that people will go back into their online environments and they will start thinking when they get into one of these heated things.
• 1:48:33
  Am I dealing with a fanatic?
• 1:48:34
  And how did that happen?
• 1:48:37
  And who am I to a fanatic?
• 1:48:38
  Why am I suddenly defending my character when I was making an analytical point?
• 1:48:43
  I think all of those things are well explained by thinking of the game theory that creates fanatics out of regular people as a result of what's rewarded and what's punished.
• 1:48:57
  Very good.
• 1:49:00
  Is that it?
• 1:49:00
  I think that might be it.
• 1:49:02
  All right, then.
• 1:49:05
  This has been episode 339 of The Evolutionary Lens and we will be back next week, same time, same place.
• 1:49:12
  We'll also be back on Sunday for our Locals Q&A at 11 a.m.
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  Pacific for two hours.
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  Consider joining us there.
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  Questions can get asked in advance.
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  We also pay attention to the chat when we're there and interact there.
• 1:49:24
  Check out our sponsors this week, which are Sundries Farm, which is shipping out their amazing garlic just about now.
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  Grown in Idaho, Dose for your liver and Xlear nasal spray to help you not get sick so often.
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  Not get sick so often and forget how to spell.
• 1:49:45
  I don't think it helps with that, but it might remind you that-- That spelling ain't everything.
• 1:49:51
  Spelling ain't everything, yeah.
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  And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside.
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  Be well, everyone.
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  (Upbeat Music)